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Sir Kenneth Gresson: a study in judicial decision making

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Despite a recent upwelling of interest in New Zealand's legal history, [1]
writing in the field remains scanty. Much of what has been written over
the years is invaluable in that it creates an accessible public record of
events, institutions or the activities of individuals. Relatively few of the
older writings display to any significant degree any attempt at analytical
history of law and legal development - perhaps because much of the
extant corpus is written for lawyers by lawyers; other works are on occasion
limited because non-lawyer authors have not managed to master the legal
issues involved in the events of which they write. Judicial biography is a
specialised form of legal history, and in the limited number of biographies [2]
of New Zealand judges so far published, instances of both these difficulties
may be found. But these are not the reasons for scholars to take care with
biographical writings. In New Zealand, as in most other Western countries,
judicial biography is often undertaken by persons with familial or personal
relationships to the subject of their study. [3] Such accounts are often what
Posner calls "edifying' accounts - that is they are designed to provide
models or antimodeis for the reader's own life; [4] others are attempts to lay
a claim to the subject's place in history. Critical appraisal cannot be expected
to form any significant element in such writings. [5] Total objectivity may
not be expected of any biographer [6] but without some approach thereto the
resultant biography is of but limited value for later scholars.

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Fields of Research::390000 Law, Justice and Law Enforcement::390100 Law